Biography note: Armando Walter Colombo (Prof. Dr.‐Ing., 53) is Edison Level 2 Group Senior Expert and Research Program Manager at Schneider Electric. He also joined the Department of Electrotechnic and Industrial Informatics at the University of Applied Sciences Emden‐Leer, Germany, and became Full Professor in August 2010. He received the Doctor degree in Engineering from the University of Erlangen‐Nuremberg, Germany, in 1998. From 1999 to 2000 was Adjunct Professor in the Group of Robotic Systems and CIM, Faculty of Technical Sciences, New University of Lisbon, Portugal. He has extensive experience in managing multi‐cultural research teams in multi‐regional projects, participating in leading positions in several international projects like the EU FP6 NoE IPROMS (www.iproms.org, 2004‐2009), the EU FP6 Integrated Project “SOCRADES” (www.socrades.eu, 2006‐2009), the EU FP7 IP IMC‐AESOP (www.imc‐aesop.eu, 2010‐2013). Prof. Colombo is listed in Who’s Who in the World /Engineering 99‐00/01 and in Outstanding People of the XX Century (Bibliographic Centre Cambridge, UK). Prof. Colombo has more than 200 publications and 22 industrial patent applications (http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=csLRR18AAAAJ &hl=de). His research interests are in the fields of cyber‐physical systems, system‐of‐systems engineering (SoS), service-oriented architecture (SoA), collaborative automation.

The future “Perfect Agile Factory” will enable monitoring, processing and control information flow in a cross-layer way. As such the different systems composing the whole enterprise will be part of a distributed ecosystem, where components, hardware and software, can dynamically be discovered, added or removed, and dynamically exchange information and collaborate. This cross-layer, intraenterprise collaborative infrastructure will be driven by business needs exposed and managed as individual and/or composed services by the system’s components. In the presentation, an overview of key challenges appearing across the enterprise architecture will be addressed, such as structural, operational and managerial independence of the shop floor and enterprise constituent systems, interoperability, plug and play, self-adaptation, reliability, energy-awareness, high- level cross-layer integration and cooperation, event-propagation and –management, among others. The major characteristics and results of first industrial prototype implementations will be presented, describing the application of the Service-oriented Paradigm (SoA) to virtualise a shop floor and allow it to expose its capabilities and functionalities as “Services” located in a “Service Cloud”. Looking at latest reported Research-Development-Innovation-Results, two major trends and key enabling technologies and paradigms will be overviewed and the major characteristics of their potential use in industrial shop floors will be highlighted: “Cyber-Physical Systems” and the fusion between “Service-oriented Architecture and Cloud Computing”.